We would really appreciate it if you could fill in the IWMW 2011 Online Evalution form. Evaluation of the event is very important in helping us make IWMW as relevant, effective, high-quality and enjoyable as it can be.

Kevin Mears from the University of Glamorgan Web team has attended IWMW before, but this year can’t make it due to some restructuring that has been taking place in his department. It’s clear that a lot of people have been through this process and many more will do during the forthcoming year. Kevin has written a blog post on his thoughts on being at risk and how lesson’s learnt at last year’s IWMW helped him get through. He has managed to attend this year’s IWMW as a remote attendee and once again enjoyed Ranjit Sidhu’s talk.

About the Process

A little over two months ago nine senior developers in the development division were identified as at risk of redundancy due to the need within the department to make cost savings. A painful process for those concerned, no doubt happening in universities across the UK. I was one of those developers and now that thankfully the process has ended and I am still gainfully employed, I thought it might be a useful to share my experience and some of what I learnt.

At IWMW 2010, there were generous helpings of pessimism about the imminent choppy financial waters, but also some great tips on how to go about navigating through. Particularly pertinent was Ranjit Sidhu of Statistics into Decisions (SiD). His talk suggested a series of approaches that web teams can use to demonstrate the measurable benefits to our organisations of the sites that we develop.

Despite the fact that we haven’t wholly implemented the advice and provided ROI information to those who matter, (in part due to the nature of how our webteam is structured) it was the emphasis on demonstrable benefits and activity that struck a chord with me. Allied with the shock to the system of a letter telling me I might be out of a job, I was galvanised into digging into what the team does and presenting that so that people making decisions about our futures were fully aware of what we do and the implications of us leaving the University.

What we Did

As a group we decided that presenting a series of information rich slides would be the most digestible and relevant format. We figured that during the process the decision makers would be seeing lots of lengthy reports and proposals and that we should make use of our ability to digest and present well structured, relevant information possibly with the added benefit that we would potentially have something at the end of the process that would be like a team CV. (As an aside it occurred to me that the logical next step would to create a site where this could become an ongoing resource. Just need to find the time.)

We began collecting data on the sites that we run. Nothing too difficult, but numbers that would offer some kind of perspective. One example was categorising the sites we run by department to make it clear that we provide a service for the whole organisation. I suspect that we aren’t the only web team that has marketing has it’s major stakeholder, and it’s easy to forget how many people that we cater for. That was a nice reminder for us.

We thought of other measures that might be relevant and help people judge – Number of Pages, yearly Pageviews, Number of Databases, Number of documents, Users trained, Number of feeds – all of which provided people not intimately acquainted with our activity an overview. It also surprised me. I was amazed by the thousands of documents that we host and it was also good to be reminded how many people rely on the platforms we provide. I’m sure that a detailed examination of the stats could find problems with our methodology, but the point was to present our activity in the context of a conversation about value and effectiveness.

In our other slides, we talked about Ruby on Rails and Django, which we use to power the majority of our sites. We mentioned our ongoing efforts at going Agile, including some stats from the Pivotal Tracker system we use. We also included some testimonials from stakeholders, rough estimates of costs to replicate what we do, some things about the experience and commitment of the team, screenshots of sites and other areas that we have worked in.

These were to try to give a picture of how we’ve developed a way of working over the years, and that it would pretty difficult to recreate that once it’d been dismantled in a round of cuts. A particularly useful slide was the one showing how we worked on a particular project. Github provides some nice charts and the impact one shows commit activity.It showed all of the team committing code throughout the project in parallel. Not remarkable maybe, but so much nicer when displayed.

What I Learnt

Surprise, surprise it feels bad to be given a letter labelling you as ‘at risk’. The real revelation for me was, once I had recovered from the inevitable dent to one’s confidence and realisation of the gravity of the situation then I felt galvanised by the process of pulling together all the relevant information. Having a focus made me feel like I was back in control of my destiny. As a web team we work intensively on sites, release them and then move on to the next one,only revisiting the site when it becomes ‘tired’. It struck me that better and more proactive measurement is possibly a way to stay more in touch with one’s sites whilst simultaneously broadcasting the good work we do. Maybe everyone else already does this?

When we have so many things that we would like to develop; Social media, personalised content, responsive design, open data and many more that it’s all too easy to neglet the presentation of what we do. By doing that I think that we not only do oursselves a disservice by being taken for granted, but also the organisation’s that we are in, because they need to know that by investing in commited , skilled and passionate developers they get very real tangible benefits.

Amber Thomas from JISC discussed how institutional repositories, open educational resources, podcasts, digitised library resources, and academic blogs can be used to maximise impact, aid in marketing and recruitment, and increase engagement with the world outside the university.

I have been thinking a lot recently about how to move beyond the rhetoric of “open equals good” towards identifying where open approaches help us meet key business cases. A notable quote from the Power of Open book launch was that “open isn’t a business model, its a part of a business model”. [Read More]

Amber provided a context to her presentation by describing the values of the sector, comparing these to the often despised values of markets, highlighting the openness agenda on one side and the “dirty words” associated with measurement and monetization on the other….

“

Thomas: How relevant are open access, open educational resources, open practice, open data and open innovation to your day jobs? #iwmw11 #p2

We then used the voting pads to decide on which legal issue we wanted to hear about first. The order was as follows:

1. Cookies

European Union e-privacy directive has been amended to state that explicit consent must be given before cookies can be used. No detail in implementation has been given and nothing to be enforced for 12 months (May of 2012). This means 12 months for Web manager to work out how to do this i.e. so that users actually see that they are accepting cookies.

The possible options are to change your site to be compliant (you can only get out of it if cookie is necessary for strict function of Web site). You could have an entry page that says that people have agree to cookies or you could take some steps in preparation but wait to implement and see what happens. Alternately could not do anything, lobby the government and hope that it is sorted out by next year. Note that Google Analytics code counts as a cookie. JISC Legal plan to come up with some guidance in this area.

Some institutions are already dealing with this by relying on a privacy statement. To sum up this is a problem that wasn’t there that someone has tried to solve!

2. Legalities of the Cloud

A number of legal issues the come up, primarily data protection and that data cannot move outside the European Union unless certain criteria have been met. Safe harbour is the US way of getting round this – Google and Microsoft have signed up to it, Amazon have suggested that they will have an EU base. Google said they would use a base in Ireland, but their agreement is still not ready. What students have in their email is not related to data protection, but staff email is and is held on behalf of the university.

JISC Legal already have briefing papers on this area.

3. Your Institution’s Risk Appetite

Jason explained that this is a grey area and we have to live with it. However it is worth knowing that being how much risk you take depends on what your aims are and being very risk adverse hampers your mission. Your institution risk appetite needs to be explicit and supported (when things go wrong), possibly in the form of a risk policy. The EDINA social media guidelines are suggested as a useful resource.

Jason gave the analogy of medicine where surgeons are allowed to do pioneering surgical procedures in order to ‘move on’ in medicine, risk is mitigated, but there are still risks.

4. The Digital Economy Act

We’ve all heard of the DEA – legislation that specifies that copyright infringement by a user can result in a termination of the infringers’ Internet connection. The suggestion is that if there are 3 copyright infringements then the JANET connection will be cut off – this is totally unworkable. There needs to be some balance here with regard to copyright and monitoring infringement. Web managers don’t necessarily need to take action but you do need to educate your users and encourage appropriate respect for copyright.

5. Mobile Learning

No law has changed but the technology is constantly moving on. Lots of new technologies such as geolocation, tracking data, augmented reality have recently hit the mainstream – quite often technologies move on without considering all the issues. Often there are papers and policies in this area, for example there is a new paper coming out on data encryption. Our role (could be) to ensure that the pursuit of technology doesn’t overtake consideration of relevant issues

6. Proper Data sharing

As a sector we are pretty good in this area. You can already sign up to the privacy promise pledge made by the information commissioner, but there has been suggestions that we could share more, for example by annonymisation. However there are cases when data sharing can affect lives so we need to bear this in mind.

Brian Kelly and Marieke Guy have opened the 15th International Web Management Workshop at the University of Reading.

We were welcomed to the University of Reading by the Director of External Affairs, Shaun Horan, who provided a context to the landscape for universities and how web teams might fit into this landscape…

“

Universities are going to have to get better at marketing themselves… reputation will be central to what universities do #iwmw11 #p0

From September 2012, prospective higher education students will have easy access to the new Key Information Set (KIS) to help them choose what and where to study. Under new arrangements published jointly today (June 16) by HEFCE, Universities UK and GuildHE, universities and colleges in England will be required to publish a KIS for each undergraduate course they offer (Note 1).

Brian also invited Mike Nolan from Edge Hill University to feedback about the work of the DevCSI Open Data Hack Day yesterday. Here are some of the ideas and developments Mike reflected upon…

“

Nolan: Web teams may be able to provide assistance integrating information from estates to make campuses more efficient #iwmw11 #p0

This year we are trying something a little different and will be using Adobe Connect to stream the plenary talks. One of the key reasons for us using Connect, rather than another live streaming service, is that we feel it provides a unified space for the end user: it pulls together video of the speaker, a twitter feed for the plenary hashtag, slides for the plenary and a chat facility

Adobe Connect is based on Adobe Flash technology but an app is also available that will still let you watch the streaming. It is marketed as a “complete enterprise webinar solution to increase attendance, boost response rates, and generate more interest through rich and engaging, highly-interactive and impactful online events“. Collaborate, who deliver live webcasting and web conferencing, have sponsored our use of the software.

iPhone app for Adobe Connect - swf pods will not work but streaming will

Squiz and Funnelback Search are looking forward to exhibiting at the IWMW once again this year. Last week, Squiz held a pre-IWMW seminar in London featuring a number of talks on Web Experience Management Solutions, including two case studies from universities which may be of interest to IWMW2011 blog readers.

Daniel Jackson, Development Manager at City University, presented a case study of their recent web project to redesign and rebuild the university’s two corporate websites and create a new intranet for staff and students. This huge undertaking incorporated a new CMS (Squiz Matrix), new search engine (Funnelback Search), new servers, new network, new content, new IA, new design, new business processes… the list goes on!

Dan’s talk took us through the project process from inception to completion and delivered a lot of useful information and advice along the way, such as their use of domain driven design to determine appropriate focus areas for their site content. Dan also showcased their course finder – a user-friendly tool, powered by Funnelback Search, which makes the university’s course information easy to access and navigate. You can view a summary of the case study, along with the presentation slides, on the Squiz Blog.

The second case study, presented by Kris Collins, the University of Bedfordshire’s Online Marketing Manager, detailed their ongoing project to completely redesign and rebuild their website – it’s due to go live at the end of July. The overhaul includes migrating from their old CMS, which was too technical for content-editors to use and was no longer able to meet the demands of the site, to Squiz Matrix – a much more user-friendly and powerful CMS.

A key requirement for the new site was that it had to take into account the constantly increasing number of users who access the site from mobile devices. The solution was to build the site with a responsive web design which adapts according to the width of the user’s browser, making it equally usable on a desktop computer or mobile device. The responsive design is a great way to meet the needs of the mobile users without requiring additional resources for maintenance of a separate mobile site or application.